Stories rule. We move through nets of sticky fictions, flailing our way past low-hanging sentences, stumbling over paragraphs, trying not to trip on the odd epiphany.
And suddenly we find ourselves exactly where Richard Powers has long predicted we would be:
Poised, at every moment, in the center of all the stories in the world.
“What you want to do,” he says, “is to keep putting stories in front of other stories. The purpose of art is to remind us that there are an infinite number of options that we haven’t even considered yet.
“There are lives so far beyond the lives we thought we were living. Writing, as I see it, is a formalization and discipline of what we’re all doing all the time — living our lives as a tale told.”
Powers really does talk that way. He talks in fully formed, beautifully patterned paragraphs that he seems to peel off the top layer of his thoughts like a C-note from a millionaire’s bankroll.
The 46-year-old author, whose eight novels have been heaped with praise, speaks softly but carries a big idea: that the world is finally knowable only through the stories we tell about it.
In a small house tucked along a tidy little street near the campus of the University of Illinois, where Powers holds an endowed professorship and teaches in the creative writing program, he spins his extraordinary yarns. He is known to be a bit reclusive — this interview will probably be his last American one for a good long while, he says, before he “goes back underground” — but his novels never stop talking.
They talk about cognitive science and artificial intelligence (“Galatea 2.2”), about molecular genetics (“The Gold Bug Variations”), about virtual reality and terrorism (“Plowing the Dark”), about racial identity (“The Time of Our Singing”) and about our demand that everything be about something else, thereby outsmarting ourselves at every turn (“Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance”).
In addition to the cerebral song-and-dance, though, they also tell gorgeous, heartbreaking stories about love and pain and the piercing desire for connection. And they have won him a slew of atta-boys, including a MacArthur “genius” grant, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize, a Lannan Literary Award and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.
His latest novel, “The Time of Our Singing,” is a finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, which will be announced Thursday.
Powers looks like Stephen King’s handsomer younger brother. His pale green eyes resemble chips of stained glass. His fingers are long and thin. His hair is dark brown, with the occasional thread of gray, and it falls in a thick curtain, without so much as a hint of curl. Powers, in fact, seems composed entirely of straight lines and right angles: He’s tall and lean, and he moves with the efficient grace of an animated T-square.
Which is why, when he discusses his work, it’s a surprise to discover that Powers is really a softie. He doesn’t much like his reputation for chilly brilliance — a typical rap, and meant as a compliment, since his sentences sing about DNA and Descartes and microchips and meta-narratives — and he wishes that critics would remember that he also writes about love and family and longing.
“They say, `He’s a novelist of technology, a novelist of science.’ I want to say, `No, I’m a novelist of people.’ Of our hopes and fears,” Powers declares, in a slow, emphatic voice that gives each word an equal weight of intensity. This is a man who wants to be understood, a man for whom communicating is clearly as essential as breathing.
The kettle on the stove utters its screechy summons, and Powers carefully prepares a pot of tea for himself and his guest in the bright kitchen. The compact, one-story house at first seems a little too snug, but as the day goes on, you realize that it’s just right for Powers and his wife of three years, Jane Kuntz, a French professor at the U. of I.
Kuntz, a pleasant, petite woman with dark hair as whimsically unruly as Powers’ is obedient, does her work in an office just off the living room. Her husband writes in the bedroom adjoining the kitchen. They seem to move easily, seamlessly, around each other, working and living, coming together to chat about domestic details and then going away again, to their separate work areas.
He had lived alone for a long time before they married, says Powers, a man for whom solitude is sustenance. But making room in his life for Kuntz wasn’t difficult. “Some people take up space. Some people make more space. She’s among the latter.”
Both hail from the Midwest — Kuntz from Dayton, Ohio, and Powers from Evanston — but both have lived other places as well: Kuntz spent almost two decades teaching in Tunisia, while in the late 1980s, Powers called the Netherlands home.
Loyalty to university
Now, however, “I feel a lot of loyalty to this place,” Powers says of the university. That loyalty extends to the Midwest as well, to the landscape that unspools in his imagination just as endlessly as it seems to do between Chicago and Champaign, where the vast farms stretch from horizon to horizon. Powers describes that drive as “2 1/2 hours of level, more-or-less-uninhabited agribiz.”
He gives a lot of thought to this geography, to the crinkled map smoothed out beneath the hard palm of circumstance. Midwesterners know that “it’s only the soil and the sun that keep you in business from one year to the next,” Powers muses. “There’s very little anchor. A Midwesterner knows he’s a bit of a usurper on the land. The mentality is, `We’re here, but it’s kind of lucky and late for us to be here.'”
The tendency to wonder deeply at the world was bred in his bones, the consequence of a family that didn’t do things in ordinary ways. When Powers was 11, his father accepted a job as a school principal in Bangkok and the family left north suburban Lincolnwood.
Gone, suddenly, was the world of paper routes — Powers delivered the Chicago American — and predictability. Powers and his two brothers and two sisters lived in Thailand for five years.
Back in the United States, Powers enrolled at the U. of I. as a physics major, but only because he was forced to choose. He was interested in everything: science, literature, computers. If it was new, if it was intellectually challenging, Powers was hooked. His family was sure he’d be a scientist. Instead he switched to literature, aiming at a writing career — so that he could, in effect, sample all possible worlds. He stuck around Urbana-Champaign long enough to earn a master’s degree in English.
Then it was off to Boston, where Powers — who had taught himself to write computer code, a skill that made him far more employable than your average lit major — took a job as a programmer. He lived near the Museum of Fine Arts, past whose treasures he’d wander in his free time.
And then, in a moment so memorable and iconic that every true Powers fan has imagined it many times in her or his mind’s eye — he inspires just that sort of cultish worship — Powers paused in front of a 1914 photograph by August Sander, titled “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.”
Had a Richter scale been nearby, handily wired to Powers’ soul, the machinery would’ve shattered from the sheer force of the blow. Calling Sander’s work “the birth photograph of the 20th Century,” as he did in an earlier interview, Powers realized that his eclectic reading and all-over-the-place thinking had suddenly coalesced into the powerful, overwhelming need to describe that image and its aftermath: the modern world.
It was as if the farmers — spiffed up for their night on the town — were glancing casually at the century’s last minutes of innocence. Powers’ present-day narrator finds himself drawn to the photo; the story of his efforts to track down its origin is interspersed with the farmers’ lives — imagined by Powers — as those lives are hurled into the dark decades lying in wait for them.
An unexpected hit
The book, published in 1985 when Powers was 26, was an unexpected hit. To escape the subsequent swarm of journalists and admirers, Powers lived abroad for several years, then on Long Island. But he compounded his problem — the problem of public acclaim — by producing a succession of books so shimmering, so unique, so incandescent with meaning and mystery, that what Powers now ruefully terms “the beauty of anonymity” was gone for good.
“What is remarkable about Powers,” says Joseph Dewey, “is the sheer generosity and humanity of his vision. He writes big, old-fashioned novels of ideas, like his fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow.”
Yet Dewey, English professor at the University of Pittsburgh in Johnstown and author of “Understanding Richard Powers” (2002), concedes that Powers’ beguiling gifts may scare off some readers. “They are novels that evidence an extraordinary range of intelligence, from a writer whose own curiosity has given him a range of expertise that can be intimidating to a reader.”
If readers endure a staticky fizz of confusion at the outset, though, they’ll be rewarded, Dewey promises. “Despite the initial difficulties — perhaps complicated by Powers’ love of language and his dazzling stylistic sense — Powers’ fiction is immensely engaging,” demonstrating as it does that “we are never as alone as we might feel.”
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who teaches English and media studies at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., is finishing an essay on Powers’ novels that she’ll present at an international academic conference in Paris in April devoted solely to his work. In novels such as “Gain,” which blends the history of a fictional soap company with the biography of a woman dying of cancer, Powers “combines large, wide-angle perspectives on the history of American corporate culture with a very, very personal story about the effects of that culture,” she says.
That kind of appreciative regard, while nice, is precisely what Powers feared most early in his career: the distraction of success. So he refused to allow his picture to adorn a book jacket until “Galatea 2.2” (1995) and rarely spoke to journalists.
“There’s a danger in creating a public persona,” he says today. But the opposite impulse — becoming a J.D. Salingeresque recluse, about whom people whisper and speculate darkly — has a downside as well. “You get a reputation about the reclusiveness. It was just as distracting as any story I might put forward. So I thought, `If there’s going to be a story one way or the other, I might as well tell my version of it.'”
So he gradually began to talk, explaining himself, proving to be wonderfully articulate about his work. In 1992, he accepted an offer to return to his alma mater in Urbana-Champaign to teach, to be close to what he calls “the evocative simplicity” of the Midwest.
He has been here ever since, living in the buttoned-down little house with the square front porch in a town that seems to keep him serene and happy. Having read his work, you expect a little angst from a Richard Powers, a touch of postmodern anxiety, a tiny frisson of existential discontent.
But you don’t get it.
“This is a great place to be a writer,” Powers says. “It’s small and simple, but with a great deal of intellectual activity. I feel a loyalty to this place.”
His colleagues return the sentiment. “You won’t get any bad words about Rick around here,” says Martin Camargo, chairman of U. of I.’s English department. “He’s a good guy.”
Camargo adds, “The stereotype of the writer is, `Leave me alone; I just want to write.’ I don’t get that sense from him at all.”
Initially, though, Powers’ reputation as a publicity-dodging eccentric followed him to Urbana, recalls Peter Kuntz, Powers’ brother-in-law.
When Kuntz first heard that his sister was taking a teaching job at the U. of I., “I told her, `Well, you’ll have to seek out the local hermit — Richard Powers.'”
But when Peter Kuntz, a Chicago resident who works as associate producer of the Chicago Humanities Festival, finally met the author, he was surprised. “Here was this gentlemanly, thoughtful person. It was very different from my image of the Pynchonian mystery man.”
A good listener
Powers, Peter Kuntz adds, is “such a good listener. And a generous laugher.”
That generosity is manifest in Powers’ daily schedule. While writing is what he most loves and must do — “Given a clean desk and an open calendar, I write all the time, all day long” — he spends two to three hours each morning answering e-mail.
Why not just ignore the e-mail? “The work would dry up,” he says. “If you’re stingy with the world, your words will be stingy too. With each new book that goes out into the world, the sense of obligation increases.”
His latest, “The Time of Our Singing,” is a bit of a risk, since it swerves from his usual subjects of science, technology and selfhood. “When you reserve the right to reinvent yourself with each new book,” Powers says, “the downside is that the readership attracted to your previous books is going to be baffled. They’re not necessarily going to want to travel with you.”
If they do, however, they will find a lyrical, densely wrought novel about two brothers and a sister in a mixed-race family — a white father and a black mother — who are wounded by racial prejudices of the 1950s and ’60s and by our chronic impulse to categorize people.
In writing about race, “I knew I was walking into this tremendously charged, tremendously problematic terrain,” Powers says. “One of the things the book asks is, `Maybe the racial anxiety we feel is driven, in part, by our fear of difference.’ Or maybe racism is driven by exactly the opposite fear — a fear of similarity. Maybe we’re not all that profoundly different. Wouldn’t that be scary? Because who are we then, if we’re not the opposite of someone else?
“Maybe we’re losing ourselves to mixing — and wouldn’t that be scary? And wouldn’t that be full of infinite possibility?”
His next book, Powers says, will be about memory loss caused by brain injury. “Everything that you do re-narrates what you want to do,” he adds. “You keep writing. You keep looking. You keep re-inventing.”
And if you are Richard Powers, you keep moving, changing, combining the rigor of science with the volatility of human longing, traveling, as a character in “The Gold Bug Variations” says, “beyond cleverness to joy, outside admiration into understanding, rubbing shoulders against wonder.”
A Powers potpourri
She was that peculiar late-century creature, the unwitting ironist. Born in one of those Oak Hill Park Forest Elm Grove places on Chicago’s North Shore, she had fled to the East Coast to escape the life of dental hygienist that every intelligent, midwestern, not-yet-married urban woman was forced into.
— “Prisoner’s Dilemma” (1988)
Anything complex enough to create consciousness may be too complex for consciousness to understand.
— “The Gold Bug Variations” (1995)
Her work here was just a rough draft for technology’s wider plan. The world machine had used her, used them all to bring itself into existence. And its tool of choice — its lever and place to stand, the tech that would spring it at last into three dimensions — was that supreme, useless, self-indulgent escapism. The thing that made nothing happen. The mirror of nature. Art.
— “Plowing the Dark” (2000)
Music itself, like its own rhythms, played out in time. A piece was what it was only because of all the pieces written before and after it. Every song sang the moment that brought it into being. Music talked endlessly to itself.
But no one sees anyone else, in the end. This is our tragedy, and the thing that may finally save us.
“The Time of Our Singing” (2003)
Lying down on the job puts Powers in mood
Richard Powers wrote his first few novels the old-fashioned way — longhand, with revisions done on a computer — but for his latest, “The Time of Our Singing,” he began to write while reclining on his bed, speaking into a headset.
The headset is connected to a software program that converts his spoken words into prose on a computer screen. Several different software programs are available to convert speaking into writing; the most popular are Dragon NaturallySpeaking and IBM’s ViaVoice.
Powers composes that way, he says, because “I want to feel as if there isn’t any mediation between me and the words as they come out. In a way, typing is a very artificial thing. We’ve gotten good at it, but basically it means breaking down the whole semantic phrase into individual letters — which is not the way we think and compose.
“In dictating, I can get back to the whole sense of the phrase. Plus, it’s a wonderful test of your prose to hear it spoken out loud. Everything is audible. You can’t hide.”
Lying down is part of the creative ambience, he says. “For me, the whole goal is to get back to that primal state of just being in the dark, in a kind of sensory deprivation tank, just seeing these stories solidify and become as real as the world.
“Increasingly, I’m using software whose purpose for me is to be invisible. I ask it to get out of my way,” Powers says. “It will be interesting to see if there is a kind of fundamental shift in my style as a result of this.”
He gets irritated, however, when people focus on the tools rather than the text. “It’s not about the machines. The machines may incline you in one direction or another, but they can’t solve it for you.”
— Julia Keller
